150 Kariseb/Implementation of article 9 of the Women’s Rights Protocol in Namibia limited place in public space. What is needed is a total deconstruction of private/public socialization right from the outset. Secondly, like the public/private socialisation, cultural socialisation too has affected women’s perception of and inclusion in political structures in Namibia. As Rao observed: …[t]he notion of culture favoured by international actors must be unmasked for what it is: a falsely rigid, ahistorical, selectively chosen set of self-justificatory texts and practices whose patent partiality raises the question of exactly whose interests are being served and who comes out on top. We need to problematize all of culture, not just the perceived ‘bad’ aspects. When we limit our inquiry to egregious violations, we limit our capacity to ameliorate human pain to just that one instance of a ‘bad cultural practice.’ Without questioning the political uses of culture, without placing the very notion of culture in historical context and investigating the status of the interpreter, we cannot fully understand the ease with which women become instrumentalised in larger battles of political, economic, military, and discursive competition in the international arena.77 The suppression of women in political processes, manually often at the whim of elitist men and structurally by established state processes, has much to do with the social development of persons and their integration and reaction towards this moral development. Thus when women, or, even some men view themselves as less credible for political spaces, their socialisation embedded in their moral development is central to that line of reasoning. The study of moral development is certainly nothing new, and has, for some time, been a focus study in human psychology.78 Different psychological schools tend to explain the social influences of human reasoning. One such theory that has caught the attention of socio-legal academics and anthropologists is the social learning theory. Viewed from the social learning theory, behaviour is acquired by direct learning, modelling and imitation, and is maintained by positive reinforcement. Another major challenge that has hampered women from penetrating political spaces in Namibia is the fact that historically women have not enjoyed the same level of autonomy that men enjoy. In practice, especially in remote and rural Namibia, including peri-urban areas, a women’s worth is measured largely in relation to the man to whom she is associated.79 This position was deeply entrenched in both customary and common law. For example, until the promulgation of the Married Persons Equality Act in 1996, men legally, on the basis of their sex, acquired marital power and control over the person and property of their wives. Although the positivist common law position 77 78 79 A Rao ‘The politics of gender and culture in International human rights discourse’ in In J Peters & A Wolper (eds) Women’s rights, human rights: International feminist perspectives (1995) 174. See generally, JR Rest Moral development: Advances in research and theory (1986) 1; J Piaget The moral judgement of the child (1950) 1; FN Kerlinger Foundations of behavioral research (1986) 1; L Kohlberg & R Kramer ‘Continuities and discontinuities in childhood and adult moral development’ (1969) 12 Human Development 93-120; L Kohlberg ‘Stages and aging in moral development some speculations’ (1973) 13 The Gerontologist 497-502. J Mertus ‘State discriminatory family law and customary abuses’ in J Peters & A Wolper (eds) Women’s rights, human rights: International feminist perspectives (1995) 137. See also H Charlesworth ‘What are “women’s human rights”’ in Cook (n 73) 69.